Quality Plan

A project quality plan is a written plan that details how you will manage quality on a specific construction project.

This is different from a company quality manual, which explains your quality policies and procedures in general, but not with
information specific to each project.

Clients may ask for project quality plans in different ways. One way may be that your contract says you need to submit a
quality control plan. Another way may be that your client comes out and asks for a project quality plan.

In most cases, everyone wants the same thing: your project quality plan, company quality manual, and standard operating
procedures.

Below is a list of questions your project quality plan should answer. Underneath each question, I’ve listed form(s) you can
include in your plan on which to give your answers (e.g. the information your client wants).

Project Quality Plan

Who’s on the project quality management team?

 A Project Organization Chart
What makes them qualified to be there?
 Appointment Letters defining the responsibility and authority for each team member’s position
 Personnel Qualification Form verifying the capabilities of each team member and who approved them
 Resume for each team member
What training will you provide to make sure your people have the necessary skills and knowledge for this project? Will you train
your customer on operations and maintenance? This should include quality system, quality procedures, and the technical
training.
 Training Plan indicating the training and who has received it
Who are the points of contact for the project?
 Point of Contact List
How will you make sure all quality-related information gets to the people that need it?
 Project Quality Communications Plan
What documents, reports, and records will you submit, by when, and to whom?
 Project Submittals Schedule and Log

Project-Specific Standards

What regulatory codes and industry standards apply to this project?

 Project Regulatory Codes and Industry Standards Form

Project-Specific Inspections and Tests

What inspections and tests will you conduct for this project? How will you record each inspection and test?

 Inspection and Test Plan Form

 Quality Controlled Construction Task Form

What measuring devices need calibration and how often?

 Measuring Devices Calibration Form

 Project Purchasing

What credential and resources do your key subcontractors need such as licenses, insurance, production capacity? Also, how
do their quality programs meet your requirements?
 Subcontractor and Supplier Qualification Form

Who are your qualified suppliers and what materials will they supply?

 Source of Supply Form

In Conclusion

Clients are concerned about how you will manage quality on their projects. Addressing project-specific, site-specific and
contract-specific requirements in your project quality plan is how you will comply with their requirements.

However, project quality plans are limited in scope. So, make sure to also spend time developing your company-wide quality
policies and procedures and include them in your quality manual.

Quality Improvement
Quality improvement (QI) is a systematic, formal approach to the analysis of practice performance and efforts to improve
performance.

A variety of approaches—or QI models—exist to help you collect and analyze data and test change. While it’s important to
choose a reputable QI model to guide your efforts, it’s more important that you fully commit to using the QI process and good
QI practices.

Benefits of QI

Understanding and properly implementing QI is essential to a well-functioning practice, and is necessary for any practice
interested in improving efficiency, patient safety, or clinical outcomes.

In addition, good QI practices and improved patient outcomes position your practice for success by:

 Helping you prepare for the transition to value-based payment models.

 Allowing you to participate in the public reporting of physician-quality data.
 Giving you the opportunity to participate in the federal Quality Payment Program (QPP) following one of two tracks:
the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) or the Alternative Payment Model (APM).
 Equipping you with the skills necessary to apply for and complete national recognition programs, such as National
Committee for Quality Assurance’s (NCQA) Diabetes, Heart/Stroke, and patient-centered medical home (PCMH)-
recognition programs.
 Helping you earn Family Medicine Certification-Performance Improvement activity credit (formerly Maintenance of
Certification) requirements.

Quality Improvement Basics

The QI process is grounded in the following basic concepts:

 Establish a culture of quality in your practice. Your practice’s organization, processes, and procedures should support
and be integrated with your QI efforts. The culture of a practice—attitudes, behaviors, and actions—reflect how
passionately the practice team embraces quality. The QI culture looks different for every practice, but may include
establishing dedicated QI teams, holding regular QI meetings, or creating policies around your QI goals.
 Determine and prioritize potential areas for improvement. You will need to identify and understand the ways in which
your practice could improve. Examine your patient population (e.g., to identify barriers to care, frequently diagnosed
chronic conditions, or groups of high-risk patients) and your practice operations (e.g., to identify management issues such
as low morale, long patient wait times, or poor communication). Use established quality measures, such as those from
the National Quality Forum(www.qualityforum.org), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality(www.qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov),
and the Quality Payment Program(qpp.cms.gov) to guide your efforts.
 Collect and analyze data. Data collection and analysis lie at the heart of quality improvement. Your data will help you
understand how well your systems work, identify potential areas for improvement, set measurable goals, and monitor the
effectiveness of change. It’s important to collect baseline data before you begin a QI project, commit to regular data
collection, carefully analyze your results throughout the project, and make decisions based on your analysis.
 Communicate your results. Quality improvement efforts should be transparent to your staff, physicians, and patients.
Include the entire practice team and patients when planning and implementating QI projects, and communicate your
project needs, priorities, actions, and results to everyone (patients included). When a project is successful, celebrate and
acknowledge that success.
 Commit to ongoing evaluation. Quality improvement is an ongoing process. A high-functioning practice will strive to
continually improve performance, revisit the effectiveness of interventions, and regularly solicit patient and staff feedback.
 Spread your successes. Share lessons learned with others to support wide-scale, rapid improvement that benefits all
patients and the health care industry as a whole.

Quality Improvement Models and Tools

Quality improvement models present a systematic, formal framework for establishing QI processes in your practice.
Examples of common QI models include the following:

 Model for Improvement (Plan-Do-Study-Act [PDSA] cycles)(www.ihi.org): The Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Model
for Improvement combines two popular QI models: Total Quality Management (TQM) and Rapid-Cycle Improvement (RCI).
The result is a framework that uses PDSA cycles to test interventions on a small scale.
 Six Sigma(asq.org): Six Sigma is a method of improvement that strives to decrease variation and defects.
 Lean(www.ihi.org) is an approach that drives out waste and improves efficiency in work processes so that all work adds
value.

Quality improvement tools are standalone strategies or processes that can help you better understand, analyze, or
communicate your QI efforts. Examples of QI tools(www.ihi.org) include run charts, process maps, and fishbone diagrams
(ihi.org(www.ihi.org)).

Quality Policy

A Quality Policy is a set of documents developed by the top management with respect to quality that includes an overall
intentions, objectives and direction of the organization. The Quality Policy expresses the top management’s commitments to
the quality management system (QMS) and allows managers to set quality objectives. The company Quality Policy should be
based on ISO’s quality management principles and should be compatible with company organization’s other policies and be
consistent with its vision and mission.
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One of the first things to do when implementing a Quality Management System using the requirements of the ISO
9001standard is to write a Quality Policy for your company. In some ways, this sounds like a simple process; yet, in other
ways, making sure the policy is effective in helping your company succeed can seem to be a daunting task. You may be
wondering: What are the important things to think about when creating our company Quality Policy?
The Quality Policy should be the Goal of the Organization
If the policy is a reflection of the goals of the organization it can be used as a filter for business decisions. If your policy is to
“consistently deliver superior widgets while continually improving our processes and productivity,” then a manager can look at
how they are applying resources and ask, “Will making this resource allocation decision work toward meeting our
commitments to superior widgets and improvement?” In cases where the answer is no, the decision should be to not continue
with the project and find another that better leads to the goals of the company.

Start with Customer Requirements

The key to starting any Quality Management System is to make sure you understand the requirements of your customers. If
you are to successfully drive your QMS toward improving customer satisfaction, it is critical to make sure you understand all
the requirements you need to meet to attain this. These requirements may come directly from customer specification, through
industry standards, or even through legal requirements regarding your products or services. You may need to meet tight
customer on-time delivery requirements, have industry standard levels of cleanliness in food preparation, or even legal
requirements on what materials can be used in your processes (thus limiting them). Ensuring that you have all these
necessary inputs will help to make sure your Quality Policy focuses on the important elements to attain customer satisfaction.

Collect Inputs of Internal Parties

The Quality Policy is intended to be the main focus for the Quality Management System, and is intended to be usable by all
employees as a focus for their job. If this is the case, it is important to gather input from all areas of the company to ensure
that the Quality Policy is applicable to all those areas. In order to do this, it is important to get the input of people in the areas
who will need to apply the policy. If people can’t see how the Quality Policy relates to their job, then it becomes just a slogan
on the wall. But if they can see how it is relevant to their job, such as meeting on-time deliveries to customers whom the
employees can have direct influence on, it can be a filter for any business decisions.

Include Required Information of ISO 9001

The standard does impose some requirements on the Quality Policy that are important to note. The Quality Policy needs to
show the commitment of the company to comply with requirements and to improve the effectiveness of the QMS. Since a
commitment to Customer Satisfaction and Improvement are key elements in the decision to implement a Quality
Management System, it makes sense that the guiding policy of the system should include this commitment. This can be done
by stating this as a fact, such as “improving our commitment to deliver to customers on time,” but it needs to be backed up
with plans to implement these improvements. An additional requirement, although it should go without saying, is that the
Quality Policy is to be appropriate to the purpose or the organization. If you make automotive parts, the policy should speak
about this and not some other service that could be provided.
Write and Communicate the Quality Policy
With all of this information in mind, you need to draft a policy that can guide the organization and provide direction to create
quality objectives. (For more details on quality objectives, see How to Write Good Quality Objectives) It is said that a good
Quality Policy is simple, concise, and easily remembered when under pressure. It is important that all employees not just
know the policy, but understand what it means and how their job supports meeting the Quality Policy.
Focusing the actions of all areas of the company toward the goals of meeting customer requirements and improvement will
only help the company grow – and this is what a Quality Management System is for in the first place.